Deleted Resources

I would like to write a quick post re-emphasizing this particular spot of the FAQ: Why was my resource mercilessly edited or deleted?

Recently, there has been a huge surge of new users for about the last 2 weeks, and there are a bit more resources that have been pruned from Pineapple.

Until the FAQ is updated with a better list, I will outline exactly what I mean here - as I feel it's extremely important for users to know why something was there, and then gone.

First and foremost, Pineapple serves to be a list of very high-quality tutorials, tools, and assets. If something you submit is removed, this does not necessarily mean your resource sucked!

It merely means that it wasn't an ideal fit for here (and one which may be better suited for Reddit or Hacker News).

The most common resource that gets removed are tutorials that aren't very long, or involved.

Good:

Extensive, developed, and comprehensive "guides" or tutorials.

Very excellent, quality screencasts (paid and free)

Github repos with a lot of stars that people may not know about.

Not for Pineapple:

"disposable" content

Very short 'articles'

A brief blog post with a paragraph explanation and a code snippet

A 3 minute screencast about an obscure feature in a program

A short screencast explaining a tiny piece to an immensely vast topic (for example, a 3 minute demo explaining a single function in backbone.js). A much better resource would be an entire series of screencasts for backbone in general.

something that has been discussed a huge amount of times in other places (for example... a php snippet to display tweets)

A solution to a problem that can be easily googled.

"Lists" (such as other aggregated content or lists of the '10 best ice cream cones')

etc

Generally speaking, there are probably a million resources out there, and if we added every one, or even most of them, Pineapple would quickly become diluted. Currently, I'd say we have an extremely excellent signal to noise ratio for hidden gems, and they are hard enough to find as it is... even with searching, tag browsing, and a wiki.

I guarantee if you skim through 20 pages you will find something that you will like. We really want to keep it this way.

As an example, we get a lot of github 'personal project' repos with only a few stars. If the first page was continually full of resources like this, it would be increasingly (perhaps exponentially) harder to find the truly mind-altering resources that you are bound to see on here if you look. It doesn't mean your personal project is bad, but just something that may need to be a bit more developed or in-depth before it would be a good fit.

So, you could consider us quite strict on this point, but we like to think of it as doing our part to make sure our thousands of users are provided with the ultimate experience of finding what they need.

There is plenty of room for your contributions. If one gets deleted, don't take it personally :)

Looking ahead: In order to better serve users, our next round of features will also feature some notification system which provides direct feedback to users if a resource was deleted, that way they are not left in the cold.

posted by lush on Mon, Mar 11 at 01:37PM

This seems like a dubious approach. Isn't this precisely why you have a voting system? To surface content that the community values, and bury what it doesn't?

In any case, if the site is going to be manually curated, then I think you've put the cart before the horse. A notification system explaining deletions seems like an essential feature to have in place before you start removing submissions. Otherwise, how will users know what to submit?

For example, I submitted something yesterday which, to my eyes, doesn't match any of your "Not for Pineapple" criteria. It was nearly 1000 words long, featured a number of annotated images and, I believe, is a sound solution to a specific technical issue. It's been shared on Twitter more than 500 times, I see, so some other people thought it was valuable.

Now I'm disinclined to submit anything else, because the approval threshold is both unclear and, apparently, extraordinarily high.

posted by dbarefoot on Thu, Mar 14 at 09:17AM

This seems like a dubious approach. Isn't this precisely why you have a voting system? To surface content that the community values, and bury what it doesn't?

In any case, if the site is going to be manually curated, then I think you've put the cart before the horse. A notification system explaining deletions seems like an essential feature to have in place before you start removing submissions. Otherwise, how will users know what to submit?

For example, I submitted something yesterday which, to my eyes, doesn't match any of your "Not for Pineapple" criteria. It was nearly 1000 words long, featured a number of annotated images and, I believe, is a sound solution to a specific technical issue. It's been shared on Twitter more than 500 times, I see, so some other people thought it was valuable.

Now I'm disinclined to submit anything else, because the approval threshold is both unclear and, apparently, extraordinarily high.

Dbarefoot,

Thanks an lot for your feedback. I'm glad when people disagree as it helps move things forward in a direction that's better for everyone.

First and foremost you're absolutely right about the notifications. That's next, but it got overshadowed by the following...

It seems you have been a member of Pineapple for 1 day, which means you came after the entire deal with the 'buckets' feature. Basically, it used to be there was only one page of favorites, and some people (having 300+), really wanted a way to better organize their profile. That was a major feature and took quite some time. This was extremely important to me because it was a problem I didn't foresee when I built this site only 8 months ago or so. I spent a lot of time on that and it was of upmost importance.

This is another feature that's kind of like that one, one that I wasn't anticipating, but is very important. So it's definitely in the works.

Let me clarify something too, just to explain what my intentions are related to the voting arrows.

On reddit, voting arrows are to bring the great content to the top, and the horrible content by the wayside. Reddit is an aggregator where thousands of people are posting every single second in hopes of getting upvotes. As a result though, you can't search reddit for anything even remotely useful. It's a disposable content site where there is no chance of easily finding things like tutorials or tools.

Imagine if 200 low-quality articles were added to the javascript tag (which is already quite big). Suddenly everything becomes much more diluted and kind of defeats the browse-by-tag feature.

I'd compare pineapple more to Stack Overflow's system of voting. Questions are heavily moderated, and low quality accounts are deleted. There are still voting arrows though. Its because on stack overflow it's meant to be very searchable. Titles, content, formatting, grammar, etc are all extremely important. I'm sure you've had a post edited because some words weren't capitalized. Pineapple is the same way, but instead of text for a question we have a URL to a site.

As far as your particular resource goes, if I remember correctly it was about the CSS ellipsis. Part of the criteria for "problem-solving" articles are 'not easily googled'. I tried googling css ellipses before I deleted your post actually and there were like 4 or 5 solutions as the top 5 results, yours included in there. I suppose imagine that for every solution for every problem, someone submitted a resource for it.. how to display tweets, how to make text cut off, how to truncate in wordpress, how to do such and such in ubuntu. It would very quickly get full of all these solutions and hard to find other content.

I hope that answers your question a bit better :) And I do agree... notifications are greatly needed.

Thanks for that. Your site looks great, but I do think you need to explore how to signify that "this site is aggressively curated". People are likely to bring a Reddit or Hacker News model with him, as I did, and may expect that the filtering happens by the crowd, not individuals.

On another topic, I'm puzzled by the "not easily googled" criteria. Do you mean that these are tutorials for solutions that people have difficulty describing? Or are they not easily googled because they're buried under other search results?

The latter explanation seems problematic. If Google is doing its job, the best results bubble up to the top. So, you're possibly filtering out a lot of the highest quality results..

posted by dbarefoot on Thu, Mar 14 at 02:07PM

Thanks for that. Your site looks great, but I do think you need to explore how to signify that "this site is aggressively curated". People are likely to bring a Reddit or Hacker News model with him, as I did, and may expect that the filtering happens by the crowd, not individuals.

On another topic, I'm puzzled by the "not easily googled" criteria. Do you mean that these are tutorials for solutions that people have difficulty describing? Or are they not easily googled because they're buried under other search results?

The latter explanation seems problematic. If Google is doing its job, the best results bubble up to the top. So, you're possibly filtering out a lot of the highest quality results..

Yes, there are some things I haven't entirely worked out the best way for yet. That is just the transparent, simple truth.

Being a one man show for design, development, direction, etc it can be tricky sometimes. But ultimately I just want something that people can come to and use as a 'database' of resources. Say someone gets a new website and there's some unique challenges on it, I want them to come here and be able to find things that will solve or help those challenges.

Do you have any outside input how this could be done better? What would have changed your view as a new user? I was considering consolidating this original post into my FAQ, and making it more prominent in the welcome email. I'd love your thoughts, though.

As for your second question, what I'm ultimately saying is I don't want a lot of (or even any?) extremely specific articles solving very acute problems. It's hard to put into words other than, as you know, there are a LOT of acute problems out there. Probably millions for every single language and scenario. Things like... how to display a latest tweet with PHP, how to display a latest tweet with ruby. Multiply that by every reasonable language and now you have like 100+ resources for just ONE problem. Multiply that exponentially by all the other acute problems: how to display an RSS feed in a wordpress sidebar, how to display RSS feed in wordpress footer, how to do some <obscure thing> with javascript and node.js, how to get a list of coordinates from X API and show it in google maps... etc.

Things of this nature are probably applicable to less than 1% of the site, are very localized, and are likely easily solved just by typing a few phrases in Google and looking at the first results.

Granted, you will find articles on Pineapple that can be easily googled, but (hopefully, if I've done my job well), they should be for broader topics.. such as how to scale MySQL, or how to make your unix vps more secure with basic security tips, how to make rails boot faster in development. Things which apply to a greater number of people, and as such are probably harder to find searching for as you will get a TON more content related to linux security than you will on how to display latest YELP ratings in a custom widget with django.

I hope that better clarifies things. If you have any input on how I can better show this to new users, I would love your feedback.

posted by lush on Thu, Mar 14 at 03:15PM

Just don't let this place turn into the clusterfuck that is DZone.

I would shut the site down before that happens. It is an exemplary and shining example of the type of trainwreck that would happen without good moderation for quality. I think it's hilarious that one of the TOP voted resources of all times is "Why I'm leaving DZone". Gets me every time, heh.

posted by pineapple on Thu, Mar 14 at 03:16PM

posted by lush on Thu, Mar 14 at 03:15PM

Just don't let this place turn into the clusterfuck that is DZone.

I would shut the site down before that happens, fuck that place. It is an exemplary and shining example of the type of trainwreck that would happen without good moderation for quality. I think it's hilarious that one of the TOP voted resources of all times is "Why I'm leaving DZone". Gets me every time, heh.

Yeah, this is the direction that digg was heading towards before they decided it was a good idea to remove the 'Design' category and just make it a general tech site. But it had so many linkbait articles with a lot of fluff, it was pretty annoying.

Allow any submission, but mark the good ones as featured and bring those to the top/forefront, etc. Don't discourage submissions. Reward good ones. The App Store still allows bad apps, but only shows you the good ones. For blog posts/articles/etc, just create another type of submission and rarely feature them.

I see blog authors using this site as a dumping ground/traffic source. For example blog's articles which contain single paragraphs and link to outside content/tools that do not belong to the blog's author. Those tools should have a DIRECT link on pineapple, not a blog article that's acting as a facade for link traffic. There are exceptions, some articles contain useful tutorials, some barely draw the line and others fragrantly breach that line.

Another problem are articles with the headline "80 amazing photoshop brushes!". There is nothing unique about that content. Its just the same dumping strategies these blog authors are employing to generate links for SEO and to gain traffic. This problem needs careful moderation.

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